The Machine

by Joe Posnanski

  Then Sparky waited for Rawly Eastwick to come to the mound. He handed him the ball and said, “Remember, up and in, down and away. Go get ’em.” He always said something like that. Then he walked back to the dugout, and the boos started up again. Sparky shook his head. Genius is so rarely appreciated in a man’s time. Rawlins Jackson Eastwick III was a strange case. They were all strange, of course, all those bullpen guys. The lefty, Will McEnaney, was a wild one. There was this time in Indianapolis, Will had a minor league manager named Vern Rapp, a generous man who had fought in Korea. One day, Rapp caught Will in the elevator with a woman, and it was long past curfew, and it wasn’t the first time.

  “That’s it, I’m fining you a hundred fifty bucks,” Rapp said.

  “I won’t pay it,” Will said.

  “You broke a rule. You had that woman in your room.”

  “I did not,” Will said. “She was banging on my door while I was sleeping, what the hell else was I supposed to do? I had to walk her out of the hotel.”

  “You’re a liar. You had that woman in your room.”

  “No, I didn’t. I won’t pay that fine. You can’t fine me for a woman banging on my door in the middle of the night.”

  Will never paid that fine. He did have a knack for getting away with things. Pedro Borbon was, of course, certifiable. Clay Carroll was crazy in his own way too. It made you think that relief pitchers, the good ones, needed a couple of screws loose.

  Only Rawly Eastwick was entirely sane. He seemed too sane to be a reliever. For one thing, he painted. That one threw Sparky. His own grandfather had painted houses. Sparky’s father painted planes for Douglas Aircraft. Sparky had paint in his blood.

  Eastwick, though, painted on canvas. The guy was a regular Pablo Picasso. Sparky didn’t know enough about art to know if the kid had any talent, but Sparky had to admit that the fruit Rawly drew looked pretty much like fruit. One of those paintings was so realistic, the kid gave it to Johnny Bench for a wedding present. Johnny liked it and said he would hang it up on his living room wall. It all just seemed a little bit weird to Sparky. And it wasn’t only painting. The kid liked to read too—books and things, history and novels. He liked to talk about current events, the real current events, like busing and the Equal Rights Amendment. He took classes.

  It was not like Sparky had anything against these things. He believed all people should work to improve themselves, if they could. Sparky himself, for a time, tried to improve the way he talked; he and his wife, Carol, sat at the dining room table and went over some grammar books for a while. It didn’t take; Sparky had to finally just say, “Fuck it, I’m going to talk like I fucking talk.” But Sparky valued education and the arts.

  Still, Sparky wasn’t sure that a kid who painted and went to classes and read important books would be tough enough to get out hitters in the ninth inning. But here was the thing: on the field, the kid was damned tough. He competed. Like here, as Friday afternoon turned to evening, eighth inning, the Reds still leading by a run. The Mets sent big Dave Kingman to the plate. Kingman stood six-foot-six, and he swung the bat with force, like he was trying to knock over a building. They called him “Kong.” He swung and missed a lot, but when Kong connected, he hit the ball to the moon. Sparky had never seen anyone hit the ball higher than Kingman did. Some people called Kingman “Sky King.” He hit home runs that could only be called majestic.

  Kong was a pretty fearsome guy, the type of guy who should have intimidated a skinny rookie pitcher who liked to paint pictures. Only, Eastwick had this look of calm…like he knew what was going to happen. And, funny, he did know what was going to happen. Rawly threw his first fastball, and Kingman swung and missed. He threw his second fastball a little higher, and Kingman swung and missed again. He threw his third fastball a bit higher than that, and Kingman swung and missed a third time. Strikeout. Inning over.

  “Climbed the stairs,” Rawly said when he got back to the dugout, calm as could be, and Sparky just looked at his relief pitcher with a bit of admiration. Let the people boo all they wanted. Sparky knew exactly what he was doing.

  July 13, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. METS

  Team record: 60–29

  First place by eleven and a half games

  It was the last game before the All-Star break, and it was time for Joe Morgan to pull off his greatest feat of the season. This was the play he would remember for the rest of his life, the singular play from his singular season. He did not hit a home run. He did not score the winning run. He did not make a special defensive play. No, he simply destroyed the will of a man. And the man was the best pitcher in the world.

  They called Tom Seaver “Tom Terrific.” He was just thirty years old, but already he had won two Cy Young Awards as the league’s best pitcher, and he would win another one that year. He had led the 1969 New York Mets to a most improbable World Series championship. Seaver threw three different kinds of fastballs—one that rose, one that sunk, one that came out of his hand a tad slower—and he had a beautiful pitching delivery that looked like it was torn right out of a “How to Pitch” instruction book. Seaver had this great pitching mind that was always spinning, always plotting—when he had you, he really had you. He was, in so many ways, the pitching version of Joe Morgan.

  Tom was terrific that day against the Reds. The Mets led the game 3–0, and the Reds had managed two measly hits, both by Pete Rose. Morgan led off the seventh inning, and he wanted badly to get Seaver. This was the ultimate challenge. Seaver was the best. And the Machine was the best. And as they say, there can only be one best. Morgan stepped to the plate and fouled off a pitch, then fouled off another. Seaver’s fastball was hopping, and Joe realized that he probably was not going to be able to get a hit off Seaver. He was not going to get Seaver that way. He had to get Seaver another way. Joe let a ball go by, another, a third, he fouled off another pitch. Seaver walked him.

  Tom Terrific kicked the pitcher’s mound. He knew exactly what was happening. Now the game had moved to Joe Morgan’s arena. Joe stood on first base and glared at Seaver; he offered that confident smile again, the one that promised he would steal second base. He took a huge lead. Seaver threw over to first. Joe slid back easily. He had studied Seaver’s mannerisms on the mound. He had studied every move, every twitch, every facial expression, written it all down in the book he kept in his locker. Joe knew exactly when Seaver would throw to first base and exactly when he would throw home. He was a poker player who knew Seaver’s cards.

  Seaver pitched, and at precisely the right instant Joe took off for second. The Mets’ catcher, Jerry Grote, was so eager to get the ball and throw out Joe that he missed the ball completely. The baseball rolled to the backstop. Joe jogged into third base. And now the look of disgust on Seaver’s face was unmistakable. Two batters later, Danny Driessen doubled Joe home. And then, after Doggie struck out, Cesar Geronimo singled, Dave Concepcion singled, pinch hitter Terry Crowley walked, and Seaver was taken out of the game with the score 3–2. Pete Rose then followed with a two-run single against a pitcher named Rick Baldwin, and the Reds won again, tenth victory in a row.

  Years later, Joe Morgan would remember the play, but he would remember it differently. That’s how it goes for ballplayers. Details blend, memories merge. Joe remembered Tony Perez hitting a big home run after he had broken Tom Seaver. But baseball details are for sportswriters to look up. Joe remembered the feeling precisely.

  “The thing about us is that we were winners,” he said. Joe may have realized that this was a cliché—by the time he said this, he was the most prominent baseball announcer on television. He had won over many fans and, at the same time, had inspired many critics. A hugely popular Internet website had the rather telling name FireJoeMorgan.com. The subhead: “Where Bad Sports Journalism Came to Die.” It was always Joe Morgan’s fate to be both loved and despised.

  But Joe was not a journalist, not really. He was not precisely an analyst either. He was someone who fel
t baseball. He had played the game about as well as anyone, ever, and he believed deeply that the game reflected life. He believed that the only way to succeed at baseball was to play it with spirit and fearlessness. When he said, “The thing about us is that we were winners,” he wanted those words to mean something more, he wanted his audience to feel with him, to believe in those mystical qualities that make up a winner, to understand that what made the Machine hum was not home runs and double plays and strikeouts but something deeper, something from the heart, something that transcended the little numbers in the box score. It seemed that not enough people believed him.

  “I didn’t beat Seaver with my bat,” he said. “I beat him with my mind. That’s how we played. That’s how we won.”

  And they did win. They won forty-one of fifty games after Joe Morgan had come into the dugout with stitches in his shin and started screaming at them all. They had broken everyone’s spirits. They had built an almost impossible-to-believe twelve-and-a-half-game lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  “We have been destroyed psychologically by the way the Reds have been playing,” Los Angeles second baseman Davey Lopes told reporters. It was like that. The Dodgers, the mighty Dodgers, were all waving the white flag—well, all of them except Steve Garvey. He had been reading Thomas Kiernan’s new book, The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, about the 1951 New York Giants, who came all the way back from thirteen and a half games back and beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, with finality, on Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning home run. Garvey was still thinking about miracles. But nobody on the Dodgers was listening to Garvey. Some had come to complain to Walter Alston about his holier-than-thou attitude—as Tom Callahan wrote in the Cincinnati Enquirer, they complained that Garvey was “visiting too many orphanages.” Anyway, it has always been like that for teams that fall short of their hopes. The Reds were too good. And the Dodgers—as the old line went—were dead.

  July 15, 1975

  MILWAUKEE

  All-Star Game

  Pete Rose sat in the dugout with his five-year-old son, Pete Jr., and basked in the awe. Yes, the Reds had broken everyone’s spirits. It felt good to be on top of the world.

  “You gonna throw me some?” Pete Jr. asked his father, and Pete kept looking out over the field. Everyone talked about how Pete Jr. was just like Pete, who was just like Big Pete, and it made for a good newspaper story, the passing of generations. Tom Callahan would remember watching Pete Jr., standing in the dugout with a toy bat while Big Klu pitched rolled-up socks to him. When Klu’s aim wandered, Pete Jr. growled, “Hey, get this shit over, the fish ain’t biting today.” Oh, Pete Rose loved that story, kid was just like him, chip off the old block.

  But the odysseys of fathers and sons are never simple. Pete Jr. needed his father’s attention. And his father was very busy trying to be Pete Rose, author, hitter, icon, gambler, superstar.

  “Yeah, I’ll throw you some in a minute,” Pete Rose said finally, absently. He thought about his own father; he always missed Big Pete at All-Star Games. Pete remembered that day in December 1970. He went to the barbershop to get his hair buzzed. The phone rang, his barber answered, and then handed Pete the phone.

  “Dad died,” Pete’s sister Jackie said, plainly and too suddenly.

  And then Pete said to his sister: “Dad died? You mean Mom? You mean Mom died?”

  Pete realized later how callous those words sounded. But he simply could not imagine Harry Rose dying. He was too damned stubborn to die. As it turned out, it was stubbornness that may have killed him. Harry had been feeling sick at the bank, and someone offered to call him a cab. But Harry Rose didn’t take cabs. He took the bus home, walked in, told his wife, “I don’t feel good,” and collapsed. A blood clot had reached his heart and stopped it. The doctors said there wasn’t much pain, not that this gave Pete comfort. Harry Rose could handle pain. He was invincible. He was indomitable. He never called in sick a day in his life. He never missed a sandlot football game, no matter how many bones were broken. He played basketball with Pete the night before he died, and he played like always—physically, angrily, no blood, no foul.

  Harry Rose was the toughest man in Cincinnati.

  And when he died, Pete became the toughest man in Cincinnati. He cried for three days, and then he went about living—though he never got over Big Pete dying. One small paper—the Abilene Reporter-News—had a small story about Harry Rose dying, only the headline said: “Pete Rose Dies.” In many ways, that’s how it felt for Pete.

  Baseball was always important, but it became more important after Harry Rose died. Days at the track became more precious. The bets grew bigger. The nights grew longer. Life on the road became more delirious. Pete wondered, many years later, what it would have been like—what he would have been like—if Big Pete had lived. All of his young life, Pete Rose had lived to please his father. Harry Rose wanted to raise a ballplayer; every birthday and Christmas, Harry would give Pete a baseball present—a bat, a ball, a glove, another bat, a catcher’s mitt. “I don’t think I got a single toy my whole childhood,” Pete would say. Harry Rose wanted to raise a tough son of a gun, so Pete stepped in the boxing ring to impress his father. (And he got bloodied, beaten, but when the fight ended, he said, “I didn’t go down, Dad,” and Harry Rose smiled broadly.) Pete switch-hit because Harry wanted it, he ran hard to first on walks because Harry loved how Enos Slaughter did that, Pete hit first because Harry told him to.

  “We gonna throw, Dad?” Pete Jr. asked again. Pete looked out over the field. In later years, Pete Jr. and his sister Fawn would talk about how distant they felt from their father. Fawn told the writer Pat Jordan, “My father is the world’s worst father.”

  And when Jordan asked Pete Jr. what he’d learned from his father, an even more heartbreaking answer emerged.

  “What’d I learn from my dad?” Pete Jr. asked the writer Pat Jordan. After some thought he said, “My dad told me to hit the ball where it’s pitched.”

  Truth was, Pete Rose wasn’t ready to be a father. He still felt like a son.

  July 25, 1975

  CINCINNATI

  REDS VS. DODGERS

  Team record: 64–34

  First place by twelve and a half games

  The games for the Dodgers series had been sold out for months, and reporters pulled out every hackneyed line they could find in the sportswriter toolbox: the Dodgers had their backs against the wall; it was do-or-die time; there was no tomorrow; it was now or never. Really, it was a whole lot less than that. There was no race. The Reds, with a spectacular six-week show, had run away from the Dodgers. Truth was, there were no interesting races anywhere in baseball. The three-time World Champion Oakland A’s were ten games up in the American League West. The Boston Red Sox were not expected to do well before the season began, but the emergence of two rookies—Fred Lynn and Jim Rice—had changed their fortunes, and they led the New York Yankees by seven games in the American League East. And the Pittsburgh Pirates—who had won the National League East four of the previous five years—had a comfortable enough five-game lead. There would not be much tension in the final two months.

  So teams had to find different ways to draw fans. In Atlanta, they spread twenty-four thousand one-dollar bills on the field and had six fans try to grab as many as they could in ninety seconds. One of those fans, Peggy Stephens, entertained everyone by stuffing the bills in her blouse. In Minnesota, manager Frank Quilici hoped to spark his team and inspire some fan support by naming Rod Carew—the league’s leading hitter—as team captain. Unfortunately, the Twins were in last place at the time, twenty games behind Oakland. “Today seemed like the ideal moment,” Quilici said. He would be fired at the end of the season. In Texas, manager Billy Martin announced that he had been fired right in the middle of the season, and he used the moment to publicly announce that Rangers owner Brad Corbett “has owned his team for one year, and he thinks he’s a baseball genius. Corbett knows as much about baseball as I know about plastic pipe.”

&
nbsp; And in Cincinnati, the Dodgers arrived for four games. Players on each team tried halfheartedly to make it sound like the games still had some meaning. If the Dodgers somehow swept all four games, they would be only eight and a half games back, and anyway, it was something to talk about.

  “I don’t want to win this thing by twenty games,” Joe moaned to reporters, an interesting new complaint. Joe worried that the Reds would lose their edge if they won the division title too easily. In truth, he felt like the Reds already had lost their edge. They had been playing poorly since the All-Star Game (though the Dodgers were playing badly themselves). Morgan had been playing poorly. “Maybe I do too much for a little guy,” he said in a weak moment. And he went on: “I’m tired. I’m always battling, but I’m going to rest somewhere.” This was not something that a member of the Machine was supposed to say, certainly not to reporters. Joe knew, even as the reporter was writing down the words, that he had made a mistake, and his teammates would make him pay.

  The Reds and Dodgers played a doubleheader that Friday night, and more than fifty-one thousand packed into Riverfront Stadium to see it. In the afternoon, heat poured upward from the Astroturf; it felt like they were playing over a New York sewer grate. At night, moths fluttered in the lights. The Dodgers won the first game after a backup outfielder named John Hale smacked a double in the eighth inning to score Garvey and then came around to score himself a couple of batters later. The Dodgers’ previously indestructible Mike Marshall was back after missing close to two months with that mysterious injury back in April. He felt good again. And he still knew how to unwind the Machine. He threw two shutout innings, which infuriated Pete all over again.